With the advances and proliferation of communication technologies, content sharing has become commonplace. Particularly, video sharing and video on demand (VoD) services have experienced increasing demand and have seen tremendous growth in popularity.
Content delivery networks or content distribution networks (CDNs) comprise servers located across the Internet that share content provided by a content provider. CDN providers provide infrastructure (e.g., a network of servers) to content providers to enable delivery of content over a network. Proxies or proxy servers typically cache content, and then fulfill successive requests for the same content, eliminating repetitive transmission of identical content over the network. End users comprise users that use personal computers or communication devices such as smart phones to access content over a CDN.
In the context of CDNs, content delivery describes an action of delivering content over a network in response to end user requests. The term ‘content’ refers to any kind of data, in any form, regardless of its representation and regardless of what it represents. Content generally includes both encoded media and metadata. Encoded content may include, without limitation, static, dynamic or continuous media, including streamed audio, streamed video, web pages, computer programs, documents, files, and the like. Some content may be embedded in other content, e.g., using markup languages such as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). Metadata comprises a content description that may allow identification, discovery, management and interpretation of encoded content.
The above-described background is merely intended to provide contextual overview of content distribution in a network, and is not intended to be exhaustive. Additional context may become apparent upon review of one or more of the various non-limiting embodiments of the following detailed description.